Turkish vocabulary

This article is a companion to Turkish grammar and contains some information that might be considered grammatical. The purpose of this article is mainly to show the use of some of the yapım ekleri "structural suffixes" of the Turkish language, as well as to give some of the structurally important words, like pronouns, determiners, postpositions, and conjunctions.

Origins

In the ninth century, Turks began to convert to Islam and to use the Arabic (or Arabo-Persian) alphabet. When the Seljuk Turks overran Persia, they adopted for official and literary use the Persian language—which meanwhile had borrowed many Arabic words. Thus educated Turks had available for their use the vocabularies of three languages: Turkish, Arabic, and Persian.

When the Ottoman Empire arose out of the remains of the Selcuk Empire in Anatolia, its official language, Osmanlıca or Ottoman Turkish, became the only language to approach English in the size of its vocabulary (according to #Lewis). However, common people continued to use kaba Türkçe or "rough Turkish" which contained much fewer loanwords and which is the basis of the modern Turkish language.

Origin of the words in Turkish vocabulary, which contains 104,481 words, of which about 86% are Turkish and 14% are of foreign origin

With the advent of the Turkish Republic in 1923 came the attempt to unify the languages of the people and the administration, and to westernize the country. The modern Turkish alphabet, based on the Latin script, was introduced. Also, Arabic and Persian words were replaced, as possible, by: Turkish words surviving in speech, obsolete Turkish words, new words formed regularly from the agglutinative resources of Turkish, thoroughly new words or formations. However, still a large portion of current Turkish words have Arabic or Persian origins. Turkish has words borrowed from Greek due to the Ottoman Empire having conquered the Byzantine Empire. There are also borrowings from other European languages, or from the common technical vocabulary of Europe. In the latter case, the borrowings are usually taken in their French pronunciation.

Adverbs

Adjectives can generally serve as adverbs:

iyi "good" or "well".

The adjective might then be repeated, as noted earlier. A repeated noun also serves as an adverb:

kapı "door"; kapı kapı "door-to-door".

The suffix -ce makes nouns and adjectives into adverbs. One source [Özkırımlı, p. 155] calls it the benzerlik ("similarity") or görelik (from göre "according to") eki, considering it as another case-ending.

Attached to adjectives, -ce is like the English -ly:

güzelce "beautifully".

Attached to nouns, -ce can be like the English like:

Türkçe konuş-, "speak like Turks": "speak Turkish".

Adverbs of place include:

aşağı/yukarı "down/up";

geri/ileri "backwards/forwards";

dışarı/içeri "outside/inside";

beri/öte "hither/yon";

karşı "opposite".

These can also be treated as adjectives and nouns (in particular, they can be given case-endings). Also, to the demonstrative pronouns o, bu, and şu, as well as to the interrogative pronoun ne, the suffix -re can be added; treated as a noun, the result has cases serving as adverbs of place:

nereye/buraya/oraya "whither?/hither/thither";

nerede/burada/orada "where?/here/there";

nereden/buradan/oradan "whence?/hence/thence".

Postpositions

With genitive and absolute

The following are used after the genitive pronouns benim, bizim, senin, sizin, onun, and kimin, and after the absolute case of other pronouns and nouns:

Thus the label of postposition does not adequately describe gibi; Turkish vocabulary#Schaaik proposes calling it a predicate, because of its use in establishing similarity:

Eşek gibisin "Thou art like a donkey";
beni küçümseyecekmiş gibi bir duygu "me s/he-will-look-down-on like a feeling", that is,
"a feeling as if s/he will look down on me".

The particle ile can be both comitative and instrumental; it can also join the preceding word as a suffix:

Deniz ile konuştuk or Deniz'le konuştuk "Deniz and I [or we], we spoke":

here the literal translation "We spoke with Deniz" may be incorrect;

çekiç ile vur- or çekiçle vur- "hit with a hammer".

With dative

Used after nouns and pronouns in the dative case are:

doğru "towards";

göre "according to";

kadar "as far as";

karşı "against".

With ablative

önce/sonra "before/after";

beri "since";

itibaren (Arabic) "from…on";

dolayı "because of".

With absolute

The following postpositions are case-forms of nouns with the third-person possessional suffix; they can be understood as forming nominal compounds, always indefinite, with the preceding words (see also Turkish grammar#Nouns):

"...From these two accounts, we understand that
Ecevit is preparing a book called Ottoman History...
His accounts concerning Vahdettin, Tevfik Pasha and the London Conference show that
Mr Ecevit has not seriously studied our recent history,
has not seen trustworthy research and sound documentation on this subject...
He says that:
"'There are many things I heard personally from my childhood till today...'"

(Source:Cumhuriyet 19 July 2005.)

Verbs

The verb-stem temizle- "make clean" is the adjective temiz "clean" with the suffix -le-. Many verbs are formed from nouns or adjectives with -le:

G. L. Lewis,Turkish Grammar, Oxford University Press, 1967; second edition, 2000. [Structural differences between the two editions are not named in the second, but appear to be as follows: IV,4 "-çe", VI,7 "Arithmetical terms", XI,16 "-diğinde", and XII,25 "tâ" are new, while XV,1 "Nominal sentences and verbal sentences" in the first edition was dropped.